1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing algorithm that operates on a larger digital image to automatically obtain therefrom a smaller digital image containing the semantically “most significant” part of the image. The algorithm can be implemented in apparatuses, methods, and programs of instructions, e.g., software.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditional resizing of a digital image is done by downscaling fully to the target size. The problem with that approach is it hard to discern any meaningful content in the downscaled image. Another approach would be to crop out a central part of the image. This, too, rarely gives acceptable results in “grabbing” the area of interest. Thus, while work has been done in the field of downscaling an image and also in identifying objects in an image, conventional techniques do not address the issue of reducing the area of an image by a combination of downscaling, cropping, and region-of-interest identification, all in the compressed domain.